CHICAGO—William Peterson delivers a committed, honest performance in the Steppenwolf Theatre production of Conor McPherson’s 2000 play “Dublin Carol.” It’s not his fault that he is miscast in the role.

        “Dublin Carol” is a somber study of a burned out life ravaged by alcoholism. Set in Dublin, Ireland, on Christmas Eve, this may be the bleakest Christmas play of our generation. Peterson plays John Plunkett, an Irishman mordantly surveying a life ruined by booze. John now works in a funeral home, saved from a probable alcoholic death by a job provided by Noel, the funeral home director, now lying seriously ill in a Dublin hospital.

        Years ago John abandoned his wife and two children for the bottle. Physically he is still alive but spiritually he’s been at death’s door for years. The play is an 80-minute one-acter that portrays in three scenes the appalling state of John’s life and the very faint possibility that he could be regenerated in the future.

        Each scene is a two-hander between the loquacious John and another character. The first and third scenes involve John and Mark, the 20-year old nephew of the funeral home director and John’s assistant. Mark is a decent, soft-spoken lad with troubles of his own as he tries to disengage from a relationship with a young woman.

        The middle, and strongest, scene pits John against his daughter, Mary. The young woman has to come to the funeral home to tell her father that his wife is dying in a local hospital. She wants John to visit the woman but John resists. He uses his self-loathing as a shield against doing the right thing by the wife he hasn’t seen in years.

        John wallows in his own misery over his lost life, partly blaming a dysfunctional family background in which he watched his father brutally abuse his mother while John was a boy. John’s inability to come to his mother’s aid adds one more log onto the pyre of John’s self disgust.

        The problem with Peterson’s performance is not in its integrity. Peterson is just too virile for the role, his stage presence too commanding. Ideally John should be a man who looks old and beaten down by life. I never got the sense that Peterson’s John was destroyed by alcohol. Indeed, the virile Peterson looks like he could drink any fellow boozer under the table without working up a sweat.

        Without clear evidence of the havoc that whiskey has wreaked on John Plunkett, the audience has problems connecting with John’s desperation, defeat, and despair. And it’s the man’s tortured, embittered personality that holds the play together.   The production at the Steppenwolf lacks a dramatic arc. It’s mostly a set of conversions and monologues that don’t get the action moving in any particular direction. The writing is fluent, and often humorous, but doesn’t take us any place. This is a play much honored both in the United Kingdom and the United States, yet something is missing.

        The two supporting characters are ably played by Nicole Wiesner as Mary and Stephen Louis Grush as Mark. Wiesner in particular is exceptional as the daughter victimized by her weak, failure-driven father. She extracts a promise from John to visit his wife and pleads with him to stay sober for the visit. At the end of the play, John waits silently for his daughter to pick him up for the dreaded hospital visit. This is supposed to be the climax of the evening, possibly pointing to a fresh beginning to reverse John’s sense of degradation, defeat, and shame. But the moment doesn’t resonate and the play just stops without an emotional epiphany.

        CHICAGO—At the beginning of Sarah Ruhl’s “Dead Man’s Cell Phone, “ a thirty-something woman is reading a book alone in a café. She hears a cell phone ringing at the table next to her but the occupant of the table, a man with his back to the audience, doesn’t answer. Increasingly annoyed at the relentless ringing, she goes over to the table to ask the man to please pick up his call. But the man is dead.

        The woman has two choices, to simply notify the café manager that there is a corpse in the establishment, or to answer the cell phone herself. Of course, if she doesn’t answer the phone, there is no play, which may not be such a bad thing. By answering the deceased man’s phone, the woman takes the audience on a 1 hour and 45 minute journey that’s cutesy, confusing, and pretentious.

        That’s just one opinion. “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” has played throughout the country and received numerous complementary reviews. I just wish I’d seen the play those critics admired so much. The Steppenwolf Theatre is presenting the Ruhl play in a stylish, well-acted production, so it’s not the staging that’s at fault, it’s the script.

        Ruhl’s has been frequently presented by top tier Chicago theaters in recent seasons. Last season the Goodman Theatre offered her comedy drama “The Clean House,” another well-reviewed work whose merits totally eluded me. Ruhl’s advocates admire her quirky blend of the everyday and the offbeat and her kooky thrusts into profundity. In that spirit, “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” is prime Ruhl, take it or leave it.